ASPIRE for Success !

Make your Aspirations a Life Mission

I have come across several articles and books on “Success” and all of them have very special messages for the reader. It is truly motivating to read and learn how people are making their dreams take shape. We can certainly benefit from the lessons learned by those who have driven themselves on the road to success and read the milestones they have placed along the way there, for inscribed on each are invaluable insights of life.

To achieve anything noteworthy in life calls for a certain amount of “stretch” which put plainly means that one has to “struggle” with the performance and delivery of results that meet higher standards that those in play. I would rather call this a raising of the bar or an aspiration in action. Performing within our capabilities guarantees delivery against promises made, but these are mediocre performances delivering mediocre goals. Satisfaction with this leads to a dull sense of happy mediocrity and diminished dreams.

At, Valmar International , we have put together our own definition of success in our Vision Statement, drawing from all those lessons others have learned and shared and our own experiences and aspirations for success. Allow me to share this with you, as we have found these simple truths of life very useful.

We look at adopting these tenets of life as we A-S-P-I-R-E for success learning Six Shining Lessons of Life

A : Accountability for Results

Ownership of the task along with responsibility for performance is a prime element of success. Effort no matter how earnest, without focus or direction cannot deliver excellence. “If it has to be, it’s up to me !” is a common enough phrase, but we need to get it off the page and into our work ethic. Desire without a will, subscription to excellence without action, and action without accountability together deliver shallow performances and empty dreams.

The First Lesson here is “Make Your Life Count when You Put Your Signature to it”


S : Strength and Stability of Values

The guide-ropes across life are woven with the values we bring along with us. Values with hold us accountable not just for what we do, but how we do things too. Values contribute to a life with honor and morality. Values provide the higher ground, on which we can breathe the purity of the air of accomplishment, instead of suffocating in the sulphuric swamps of dishonorable practices.
Good corporate governance at the organizational level and personal ethics at the individual level can help create a single transparent and honest agenda of action.

Not having to watch your back or cover your rear while you are engaged in delivering excellence, is a major relief and allows everyone to commit resources without any reservation. Standing firm on what you believe in allows you to advocate your position and interest soundly It’s not about being obstinate, but about being definite.

The Second Lesson is “Stamp Goodness on the Charter of Life in Whatever You Do. Seal Life’s Envelope with Greatness and Leave Pettiness Penniless”


P : Passion and Purpose in Performance

Consider this. You visit a well promoted township and see towers, buildings, parks, restaurants, shopping malls, schools, hospitals and all that makes a township strewn across the landscape with no apparent design or town planning. You further notice that many of the structures were only partially complete, some surrounded by dense brush and overgrown wasteland whilst some with pruned lawns. Roads run smartly through the town but some abruptly end in rough mounds of rubble. Restaurants run glitzy advertisements of their fare and entertainment programs, but this is only in print and not in practice. Hospitals gleam with the most professional equipment but the medical services are run by it’s lone pharmacy dispensing OTC medicines. You quiz some of the townsfolk about these strange to bizarre matters, and find that they do not sense anything amiss!!

Do we recognize our lives in this context too ? How often do we really plan the township of our life ? Giving in to the flavour of the moment we may develop competences that die faster than they are used, redirect our focus mindlessly into convoluted and often unfinished paths, build towers of performance without the support structure in place, leave the “insignificant balance” of competence, performance, values and relationships unfinished or half constructed for completion at an unknown later date. But all this has a sense of tremendous busyness and activity, leaving us feeling we have accomplished things ! As we go along we make do with what we have and this makes major withdrawals from our energy and enthusiasm bank balances, till we resign ourselves to living with inconvenience and a poverty stricken future.

Bringing passion and purpose to performance allows us to create the right architecture and platform for our dreams to rise to celebrate a rich and rewarding present and a promising future.

The Third Lesson is “Blueprint your Life with Clear Purpose and Embed Your Soul in the Achiever’s Hallowed Hall of Fame”


I : Integrity of Intent

Integrity is like a precious stone. A flaw in the stone will not only devalue the stone but also may cause problems for the wearer. Interestingly enough Integrity begins with “I” which means that it lies within us to manifest. The completeness or wholeness of the Purpose we bring to our performance and relationships as well as the truthfulness and honesty of our intentions, allow us to shed the disguises and garbs of “strategic” intent which is usually opportunistic in favour of an upstanding unconditional largeness of intent which enlarges the playing field to accommodate others too.

Amidst the fog of deviousness, manipulation and exploitation, integrity of intent is a clear beacon which illuminates the entire relationship with the purity of true partnership in progress.

The Fourth Lesson is “Be of Global Intent and Design. Leave Parched Parochialism to Wither and Die in the Sunshine of Abundance “


R : Reliability in Relationships

The word relationship itself shows us that just like a ship, all hands must be on the deck and the ship of relation needs the synergy of all members to pull together, especially in rough weather. This applies to teams and associates at the organizational level or families and friends at the individual or personal level. Navigating the storms and tempests of suspicion, doubt, misgivings, moments of weakness, inadequacies and incompetence, can take a severe toll on the most weather-beaten of sailors afloat on the sea of survival and success.

Establishing a resourceful relationship which counts on the contribution of all elements in the network of life, trusting and respecting those in the network and staying with the ship provides the robustness to the relationship. Investing in the relationship unconditionally by contributing first without calculating the returns, and living all the tenets we have described this far, creates the reliability needed to put wind in the sails.

It is all about being there when it matters. Finding the right role to play and a set of convergent goals to guide individual contributions to the relationship is crucial for one to deliver at least what is expected.

The Fifth Lesson is “Run a 24x7 Relationship with Your Resources. Burn Your Leave Card”


E: Excellence as a Way of Life

Making excellence a way of life, means demolishing the middle class of mediocrity and aspiring for the “dance of delight”. Life at the cutting edge of excellence, cannot possibly be played by performing with competences one is conscious of possessing. Instead the thrill and exuberance of a full-blown life comes from reaching higher than the “essential expected” and delivering at the very “pinnacle of performance”. It’s all about asking yourself if what you do is enough or can you go the extra mile.

Pulling performances from the slums of mediocrity can be one of the most rewarding and thrilling experiences one can have. Like an eagle, once you experience the heavens, it is hard to live below the clouds. Finding refuge in being “grounded” or “down to earth” or “in touch with reality” leads to exactly that in the rewards. You are grounded in the earth, immersed in a false sense of security of a rationalized reality instead of soaring to embrace the universe.

The Sixth Lesson is “Live Life at Full Stretch Benchmarking Beyond the Best”

With these Six Shining Lessons of Life may you fulfill your dreams and ASPIRE actively for all the success that the world can possibly offer.

YOU ARE APPROVED ! Certified, Signed and Stamped by YOU !

The Seal of Approval is almost as coveted as the mysterious and elusive Holy Grail. Both are the result of Man’s quest for “Divinity by Proximity” because possessing either would mean raising of the mere mortal to the realms of the supreme spirit. From nothingness to everything, finite to infinite, inconsequential to undeniably intrinsic, banished to proclaimed, wastrel to apostle, rejected to celebrated !

Ah ! Rejection, the scourge of mortal mankind. For no man is an island, therefore he must relate to others and integrate with the rest of the world. Which in many ways translates to being accepted and approved by others in order to develop competence in the area of interpersonal relationships. Wrong !

All of us undeniably need to be appreciated, which is a positive stroke to our sense of being and doing. Dependency on this need in order to feel better about ourselves is a disorder of rationality and often an emotional overrun stemming from a whole spectrum of causes. Let’s take a look at some of them and see if we can figure a way to transcend these obstacles to a sense of self worth and equilibrium with the rest of the world.

We have been schooled to judge ourselves the ways others see us. Our education system itself unwittingly endorses this inequity, with our sense of competence and ability being judged by others in the close confines and constraints of an academic assessment of memory skills rather than processed thought, applied knowledge and competence to deliver. We ignore the multiple intelligences across which learning can be delivered and force-feed it in a manner which cannot possibly produce the best results. Those who “beat the system” by mastering the manipulation of clear process flaws, such as offered by almost any coaching or tutorial class, are approved, whilst the real student of learning can often be denied approval or competitive levels of the certification of competences , which have not really been tested.

Collective experiences of being undervalued across life often find origins in the shrouding of one’s capability in the advocated cloak of “humility” , a virtue we are told to hold dear by a generation of an old world , going into oblivion, as a guide to a new world they have barely experienced and an emerging world they could not possibly accept. Values and belief systems of a dated perception of reality, have contributed to our continued subscription to a single window of assessment of ourselves rather than a 360 degree multiple window assessment centre.

The overpowering need for approval from others has its roots in a deep scarring of a sense of self and an erosion of our deposits of self worth. Lack of approval or acceptance both direct and discreet is what we consider to be “rejection”. But how bad is rejection and what does it really mean to us ?

“I take rejection as someone blowing a bugle in my ear to wake me up and get going, rather than retreat.” Says the famous American actor Sylvester Stallone, true to his reel-life personas Rambo and Rocky Balboa

Rejection is a word we are plagued with because we have described it to ourselves as failure and we consider failure to be a destination rather than an event. To experience rejection is to experience failure – if viewed positively, this just means that somehow something we do, does not meet with what somebody expects or needs. It does not mean that we become useless or worthless. A one million dollar cheque given to a man too poor to have a bank account, does not make either the one million dollars less that what it is worth or the man poorer than he originally was. The inability to encash the cheque, simply suspends the delivery of wealth at that moment. It does not deny it. Self worth is the multi-million dollar potential we are all born with.

Each and every one of us is born priceless, and everyday we gain in value no matter what we do, simply because we are there to witness the day. We can deny the acceptance of the moment and embrace the rejection of those to come. Rejection at it’s worst is a judgement of the past, not of the future. And since the future holds all the wealth we want or desire, what prevents us from going forward ? A fall in the past ? If all our futures were pinned on the “sins’’ of the past, we would not survive childhood.

Karl Stern the noted German-Canadian neurologist and psychiatrist puts rejection into succinct perspective when he says “Psychoanalysis shows the human infant as the passive recipient of love, unable to bear hostility. Development is the learning to love actively and to bear rejection.”

So how do we get beyond the fear of rejection? Simple. Learn to love ourselves. Which means, learn to appreciate yourself, concentrating on reframing your focus from what’s wrong to what’s right in your life, approving of yourself wholeheartedly, celebrating who you are, remembering we are all Work in Progress and that Perfection is an endeavour, a journey. It is the journey that is significant, for the journey and not the pit-stops we make en-route, is the longest experience.

The next time you feel rejected, issue yourself a Certificate of Approval, signed and stamped by YOU! Encash your multi-million dollar future NOW!

VIEW THIS ARTICLE & SEVERAL OTHERS BY VARIOUS AUTHORS on http://www.tickledbylife.com/

Resolving Irresolute Resolutions

Life Deals the Cards, We Sort Them into Winning Hands !

Ho ho ho ho ! The Merry Season is here. Jingle Bells, Tinkle Bells, Plum Cake and Pudding. Christmas Joy and Cheer. The Yellow Brick Lane to Renewal, Resurgence and Restitution. Down the Lane from Yuletide, is the Corner to a Big Bang New Year ! One filled with Promise, Hope and Resolutions. Oops !! Where did that slip in from ?

I guess you already know where we are going to. New Year Resolutions, the most exciting to make, and most often, the easiest to break. At least that has been the case with most people I know and certainly with me too !

So why do we still make New Year Resolutions ? And still break them ? The “Thrill o’ Will” power struggle with “ Damn the Sham” I guess. Or just old “brainwired” habit, a ritual that routinely clicks into place.

Lets ask a few questions :

Why make resolutions at all ?
Why worry if we break them ?
Why wait until New Year to do so ?
How relevant are our resolutions to our real problems ?
How researched are our resolutions that they deliver significantly?
Can resolutions be changed as the situation changes ?
Should resolutions be changed anyway ?
How important are resolutions to altering our lives driven by destiny ?

We can go on of-course with innumerable questions to numb our mind and senses to the subject, so that we can then let it wither away from our zone of concern, leave alone our zone of influence and action.


Lets therefore see some of the logic behind New Year’s Resolutions :

The New Year is when we clear the page of life and start afresh.
The New Year has a common sense of renewal and resurgence which can find an emotional tie with our resolutions
The New Year denies the seamlessness of time that chains us down to our committed lives and helps get us of the old hook.
Every New Year seems to indicate a turning or tipping point in life. Resolutions made at the tipping or turning point are usually made with far greater insight than when made routinely.
Making resolutions are great fun. They allow us to air our dreams. Dreams given oxygen can live longer than those suffocated.
Resolutions are a release of the soul. We can unburden all our guilt of the past and commit them to the future, where we believe we can be more powerful to handle it.
Resolutions tell us what we really want, but cannot seem to get.
Resolutions are a way of making us conscious of what’s blocking our path to success or happiness.
Breaking resolutions are surprisingly an expected event, as the deeply rooted behavioral shift that is expected to accompany the resolution to implementation is often too difficult to accomplish in one go.


So what are we left with ????

Let us see if we can make some sense of all of this.

According to me, I could not agree more with the answers above.
It is difficult to give up old behavior we are emotionally attached to or have found even secret comfort with, in favour of a shining new but difficult-to-do behavior which creates extreme discomfort. It’s like wanting to shift home to a new fantastic place but have nothing to do with the back-breaking and often heart-breaking clearing, sorting, disposing and moving process at all ! But at least we now have embedded the desire to move. And we have an address.

I love making resolutions at New Year and I am delight at breaking some of them too. Funny or crazy or perhaps both ? But I do learn from them to some extent. This learning I fill into the gaps of my existing goal sheet and then it makes more sense.

The Blueprint of my life is a Five Pointed Star of Purpose and Direction.
I regularly set time framed meaningful, measurable and monitored goals in each area.

Every New Year resolution I make, must somehow connect with my 5 point Star. I must see the connect and deeply desire the difference it will make to my Star. This is the key to keeping or breaking resolutions made. It’s all about how much we really want it at the conscious and unconscious level of our thinking process. Resolutions reframe and redirect our efforts to meet our goals.

The blueprint of my life however is not set at New Year’s eve. It is an ongoing process of refining my dream. Sometime back I sat down and asked myself what goals I had in life and what was the quality of my goals ? I realized much to my shock, that my busy life was being run by happenstance rather than design. It took me a while to lay out a design and I have found this useful. May I offer this to you to see if you would like to try it out too.

The Tip of my Star is my Life Goal or my ultimate dream as crazy as it may seem. I do not change my Life Goal but continue to validate and qualify it, to keep deriving a greater sense of purpose to my life, in order to set direction
Around my dream, revolve my Personal Goals that support it, such as Health, Relationships, Social, Lifestyle, Habits some of which may also reflect in the categories below.

The other Four Points of my Star are:

My Career Goals ( My job, my designation, my advancement in my field, my professional path )
My Professional Equity Goals ( My History Sheet : What makes me Good and Reliable- the reasons why someone would invest in me namely my knowledge, skills, competences, qualifications, additional certification and so on.
My Brand Equity Goals (My Unique Selling Proposition, What I Want to be Known For, My Mindshare Flag – just as any Brand has to be developed to be an automatic choice of the market right across the segment )
My Leadership Goals (My ability to Lead, Influence, Impact and Inspire others – one does not need hierarchy to hold us hostage to the power of leadership, for leadership needs to be a way of life, anywhere in the pyramid of society or the organization )

At New Year’s eve, I allow my soul to set itself free to quest beyond the blueprint. To light up the new canvass with the same brilliance that the New Year seems to hold. I thrill at the colourful sparkles and fountains of radiance that my resolutions bring to my trusty Star of Life. And some of these glistening shards of my extended reality glitter on my Star as the year goes through. While some of them sprinkle fairy dust around the place. For even in trying and not quite succeeding, the journey itself is blessed and leaves a comet like trail to my shining star.

For this NEW YEAR may I wish you all a wonderful shining STAR of Hope and Promise, complete with glorious comet trails of glittering resolutions that fill your heart with as great a delight as the shining promise the future holds.

Bus Driving My Emotional Bank Account

Sometimes in life you do things you do not understand and yet they deliver positive results. At a shallow level of analysis, the reasons underlying this can usually be found in some commonplace answers, everyday rules, basic values and perhaps a way of life that has been adopted not by choice but by old habit.

Sometimes later in life you may realize the profound lesson behind some of these events and the immense learning it can deliver to you on your difficult yet determined way to success.

Let me share a personal experience with you that follows these lines.
Many years ago, when I was a child, I experienced a strange relationship which I did not give much thought to, but now I see it for what it was and ever since I have realized the lesson it delivered , it has changed my life.

I was the eldest of two children in a small family in Mumbai INDIA, where the family consisted my parents and also my ailing grandmother, my father’s mother, his dad having passed on many years before. It also included an aging unmarried uncle, Dad’s eldest brother, who though a hardy veteran of life in all it’s forms, had experienced terrible setbacks and had retreated to the safety of the family, a shelter from an unfriendly and hostile world.

My father was a quiet, industrious man with a strong sense of purpose and values. His humour was infectious and he embodied the “man of the house” status as if it were natural to him to deal with all the world had to shove at us, with the greatest equanimity I have experienced. Grandma’s ailments kept taking a turn for the worse, and the world too seemed to have turned a shade darker. Yet my father went about what he had to do with more vigour and yet always found the time for us children to play, teach and live in pace with our growing worlds.

My mother, was the perfect backbone the family needed. Talented and skilled in art, she set aside her career to look after grandma, and this lasted a long and arduous fifteen years. She was the rock in the family, on which dad could build the home. She was full of life, always busy, always loving, caring to the core, and for us kids, a safe haven to run to in times of trouble. In her arms, and they were strong yet immensely comforting arms affording incredible security, we could find great sanctuary from any form of danger. Mother was invincible. She was later to hold the family together with my father through such terrifying times, that this invincibility was often battered, but never gave way.

Our invincible mother died early at the age of just sixty, six months after she helped my father recover from an unexpected heart attack on the eve of Christmas 2002.

Between our two parents we learned several life lessons, not the least being how to hold a family and faith together in violent turbulence. The smaller lessons are what this note is all about.

Helping around the house, running chores, growing up from levels of dependence to almost arrogant levels of independence can often scar behavior beyond recognition. But ingrained in us was the need to be decent and respect ourselves and others in all we did. Dad was the role model here, his colleagues often telling us how much he stood apart from the others because of these traits. Mother followed up with the lessons we needed to learn to be like Dad. Respect everyone, she said, even those you feel are below your status, like the maid servant at home, the ordinary worker on the road, the shopkeeper attendant, the bus driver and bus conductor, the peon, other children, especially the deprived. Their pain and suffering was their badge of honour, she would say, their qualification for the right to an equal life.

All this translated to simple greetings like “ Good morning, Good afternoon, Good evening, Good night” and the all essential “Thank You” and “ I’m sorry” It also meant never taking credit for anything that was not due or belonged to someone else, returning money or fulfilling payments immediately without waiting for even the next day to pass, paying our fair share, and being responsible and accountable for the little things we took charge of in and around the house.

We schooled quite a distance from where we lived in Mumbai’s northern suburbs, about 15 km away, and with traffic and transport frequency being what it was around 35 years ago, mother took on the task of ferrying us back and forth, the school not having a regular bus service of it’s own. Poor experiences with a neighbouring school’s bus which left us stranded in a monsoon flood in waist deep water left her so furious, she decided that her responsibilities must include this very difficult ordeal.
So she made three trips per day, the one in between to bring us lunch, and yet managed a home almost entirely dependent on her to run. Even as carefree children and happy to see mother as often as possible , a beacon of warmth and safety , in the unfriendly environs a school often chooses to offer children; we could see the great strain this was on her. Yet she never complained.

To regulate life somewhat, mother chose a bus route that took us directly to school without any changeover midway. This meant being exactly in time for the bus and this being a ring route, we also caught the very same bus on the way back home. So we became familiar faces being regular passengers on a generous part of the route itself. Mother as usual would prompt us to greet the conductor as we boarded the bus and thank the driver as we disembarked. We would then wave to the bus driver and conductor as the bus eased away from the bus stop.

The bus conductor was almost priestly in his disposition and demeanour. Silver haired and dignified, he would return our greeting with his own blessing for the day or the rest of it, while the driver, a burly sunburned toughie with a walrus like moustache , would break into the most delightful smile as we thanked him in chorus and later waved him goodbye.

And so life went on, for a couple of years, before I finally mustered the courage to assure mother that I could take care of my younger brother and steer ourselves and back form school safely, given the regimen we had established. Skeptical of success , but now terribly overburdened, mother made a few dry runs with us to check our navigational and other competences. She also asked the bus conductor and driver duo to “keep an eye” on us. A request they quickly agreed to comply with. But could you really expect a busy public transport employee, harassed by his very work, barely managing to keep his own equilibrium on even keel, to keep this promise ? Well, we were in for a surprise.

Like clockwork we managed to make the daily circuit without any incident worth mentioning or remembering. Life was settling down to an even regularity, as far as transport was concerned. Till one day this took a big jolt. The school principal decided to lecture the school , for ten long minutes on some moral values of life after the evening prayer at the end of day. This meant that our timetabled life was now going to be turned on it’s head. The bus stop was a brisk 12 minute walk from the school door through the playfield, out of the gate, across the road at a busy traffic junction and then a straight run. This gave us 3 minutes to catch our breath and jostle in line to be the first to spring into the bus, my brother in front of me, held and shielded from the rushing crowd. Once in, the usual greeting to the conductor and a run for empty seats if any or a position in the front so one could pick up casual conversation with the walrus-mustachioed driver.

Scrambling for freedom, the school exploded onto the road at the traffic junction just across the gate. Amidst the melee, stood a red bus, unmindful of the green signal to go, and the jarring honking of the traffic behind, pumping it’s own loud horn in an SOS manner. Puzzled, I looked up, and saw a great big burly face decorated with a walrus mustache, followed by half the burly body, leaning right through the driver’s window calling us to board the bus. Grabbing my brother by the hand, I raced across and boarded from the front, to be greeted with a loud cheer from the passengers, and a huge grin from the driver and a visibly relieved conductor. Thanking him profusely, we spent the remaining journey, being grateful for not being pushed into an unfamiliar route home or being delayed to a degree of discomfort.

The memory soon passed, until it rang several bells when I read Stephen Covey’s thoughts about Emotional Bank Accounting. This concept is so simple and so real. It simply states that just like a financial bank, we deposit and borrow from people we deal with everyday. The account we use if the one we open with each and everyone we meet and work with.

It’s called an Emotional Bank Account. Simply put, we need to have a minimum deposit and keep filling in the account to make it work. It helps when we have to make withdrawals. The deposits are simple ones, like acknowledging the other, common courtesies, keeping the small promises we make, being sincere in helping, being sincere in owning up to mistakes made and apologizing with intent to repair the damage done and so on. The small stuff. But all this has to be made unconditionally without plans for withdrawals. No strings attached.

When withdrawals occur, like shortness of temper, demands on time and work priorities, abruptness with courtesies, anger mismanaged, and all the roughshod treatment we dish out liberally in a day, the unconditional deposits we have banked allow us to save the relationship from destruction.

So where does this leave my bus driver , all those many years ago ? You got it, the Emotional Bank Accounts we opened with them were liberally filled with the unconditional deposits of children not yet coached with the skills of opportunism of the world. Simple greetings from the heart of innocent children, filled the heart of these veteran workers of the daily grueling grind of life, to extend themselves to assume the role of parents , and reach out beyond call to fulfill this withdrawal they not just sanctioned but offered.

Keeping an eye on the clock, this grizzled bear of a driver, realized we would not make it on time, so he did the unthinkable, only a parent would do. Scanning the uniformed crowd of children, to search and find , two children from amongst hundreds, and get them on board, to keep a promise made so casually must have been the consequence of the EBA being driven right home.

MUMBAI BLEEDS, INDIA WEEPS

Bloodstained uniform, ragged and torn,
Bullet riddled and limp, life ebbs
Through bleeding gaping wounds..
Yet with one last heave, my city staggers,
And wraps the charred remnants of her once proud flag,
Around her gasping soul and charges.
Right into the raging fire of the damned,
To rescue the incarcerated spirit and shackled dreams,
Of a nation set ablaze, nay not with zeal or ardour,
But by the ravenous hunger of a corrupt and corrosive mind,
Of a jealous neighbor, brimming with sinister design.

My Mumbai, my city, my home,
I can scarce behold your weary listless form,
Once so graceful and with vibrant life possessed,
‘Een though with unpolished rustic charm
You could ever with consummate ease disarm
The most gracious and grandiose guest.

Shot in the back, blown apart by explosive hate,
My city bleeds, the bullet shattered bones crack,
Her eyes turn glassy and unseeing..
Oh ! my Mumbai, my city, my home
On her knees in the dust amidst rivers of blood ,
Her dying soul shudders, rattles and behold,,…

She lives, she rises, she stands valiant and tall,
Crusted with the drying blood of her young and old,
Now screams her defiance right from her very soul,
My Mumbai, my city, my home
Turns her blazing gaze upon the cringing coward,
For time is up, time is through, time has ticked
Right through, my foe, to you.

A PRESSURE COOKED LIFE : A Potful of Parenting Goulash

The children of today and their parents are subject to innumerable stressors and pressure-cooker circumstances of a competitive-crazy world. Managing daily life itself is a stupendous task. There seems to be no time or patience for any thing or for that matter any person out of control or even out of the careful alignment with our regulated lives.

The careless and carefree child, both real and the one in all of us, must conform or convert to a sedate straight-jacketed adult.

Living on the leading edge of life in today’s rushed and rough times, involves both parents being actively engaged with careers that turn in the money to fund the household and lifestyle economies. Growing awareness of competitive careers and advancement vistas in the great big span of working life, has helped cast the dragnet over even the most the unsuspecting home-warming individual.

Bounding out of the couch of comfort, both men and women are brandishing degrees and skills that lay claim to jobs and careers that demand an all-consuming attention absorbing time and life like a gigantic blotting paper.

Regulation, regimentation, rigour are the watchwords of a timetabled life , driven by the need for bringing certainty and predictability to an anticipated incredible combo of a see-sawing roller-coaster life.
Instead of creative-constructs we seek regulated-regularity. The happy lull of mediocrity is the way to an undisturbed life. But ever so often Life has other plans….

What happens when we are faced with uncertainty , when our time tables have no meaning, when our plans find no place to unfold, when our carefully crafted lives are ripped apart by reality ?
What happens when all this happens because of our children ? Or the pressures put on our children ??

Such as competitive social lifestyles, expensive gadgets & gizmos, tuitions, peer-pressure, overly competitive exam pressures, study-load, rivalries at school / college, victimization by teachers, failure, fear-of-failure, success itself, substance abuse like smoking, drugs, alcoholism, absenteeism, sickness – real and imagined………… ???

Parenting can be a bizarre experience for both the parent and the child. Almost all parents, teachers and tutors expect the child to develop in to a superhuman composition of talent, knowledge, skills, competence along with vision, foresight, clarity of purpose, ambition, all neatly folded and pressed into the sharp edges of the shining blade of the sword of success. All this must of-course fit into the pre-constructed timetable of the mentor, unfortunately soon to be tormentor !

Parenting from afar, remote controlling results, financing concern, and funding the future is the order of the day today. But where is the Love ? Where is the Care and Compassion ? Where is the Connect between lives ? Where is the Soul of the family ?

The expected brusque answer you invariably get is : Where is the Time ? Aha ! Find Purpose and the Means usually follows. Alas, the Means is oft the End !

So here is a potful of parenting goulash for the modern family meal:

1. BE INVOLVED : Decide to set aside time to connect with your children every day. Get to know your child and let your child discover you. Give the gift of togetherness, it is far more precious than any other.

2. CONNECT : Be a parent and a friend – and draw the line clearly between the two. Shuffle the cards and no matter which falls first, you will always deal a good hand. This makes the transition easier as you both grow.

3. VALUE : Always value the child. The messenger is sometimes the hapless carrier of an incorrect message.. Reinforce your belief in the person even when you have to admonish the behavior.

4. CO-CREATE : Take a personal interest in shaping, not shoving, the child’s knowledge, skills and abilities, on a regular basis.

5. BE PATIENT : Do not expect miracles to happen. Give the child time to grow and learn. Do not rob your child of the delightful process of growing and learning, just as you cannot hasten the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into a butterfly.

6. SUPPORT & GUIDE : Be available to nurture the growth of your child- mental, physical, spiritual and emotional. It is important to move from choking controls of the regulating parent to performing as a nurturing parent within the footprint of the controlling parent. Which means while setting clear and enforceable rules, throw yourself into enabling and supporting performance within the rules.

7. COMMIT : Make a promise and keep it. Let you child see your commitment to the family. Demonstration of commitment is a sure fire way to build trust. Commitment means never giving up on promises, goals, dreams and especially people.

8. LEAD BY EXAMPLE : What you want your child to do, is best reflected in what you do and how you do it too. Role modeling is one of the most powerful ways to help your child grow by your own demonstration of the “right” way. We all remember what we see and practice. So give it a go, it will help you too !

9. FORGIVE : Learn to be generous. Bearing grudges and wielding the club of reform is hardly the way to conduct life. If you have to threaten , be prepared to carry out the threat, and bear the consequences. So wherever possible, forgive the messenger, and correct the message.

10 HAVE FUN : The bottom line here is so often in the red. What is life without a good dose of fun. Let your child grow in the sunshine of love and fun. Let the children of this world want to live on.

The Menu is the Meal. Bon Appétit !!

The Learning Teacher

The arbiter of knowledge and skills, the Teacher, is a revered figure around the world. In India , the Teacher is known as the Guruji, the Wise One who can be trusted to lead the knowledge-blind and shine the light of competence and skills in the darkness of ignorance and incompetence.

Over time it has been realized that the Wise One is not necessarily the most skilled teacher. Learning proficiently and transferring the learning just as well is not really as simple as it seems. It takes far more skill to teach than to learn.

The teacher has not only to have a full and wholesome appreciation of the subject but also know how best to transfer this in an intact and useful manner to the learner considering the learning styles and needs of each individual learner.

Whilst studies have been popularized concerning learning styles, and suitable adaptation of knowledge transference has been undertaken to match the varied learning styles of participants, the newer platform of transference has to do with the multiple intelligences that seem to be far more effective in reaching across to the learner.

The theory of multiple intelligences was developed in 1983 by Dr. Howard Gardner, professor of education at Harvard University. It suggests that the traditional notion of intelligence, based on I.Q. testing, is far too limited.

Instead, Dr. Gardner proposes several different intelligences to account for a broader range of human potential in children and adults. These intelligences are:

· Linguistic intelligence ("word smart"):
· Logical-mathematical intelligence ("number/reasoning smart")
· Spatial intelligence ("picture smart")
· Bodily-Kinesthetic intelligence ("body smart")
· Musical intelligence ("music smart")
· Interpersonal intelligence ("people smart")
· Intrapersonal intelligence ("self smart")
· Naturalist intelligence ("nature smart")

How does this affect us Learning Facilitators and Trainers and our participants?

The theory of multiple intelligences has strong implications for adult learning and development.

Many adults, young professionals seeking to make their mark in life, often find themselves in jobs that do not make optimal use of their most highly developed intelligences (for example, the highly bodily-kinesthetic individual who is stuck in a linguistic or logical desk-job like Customer Care when he or she would be much happier in a job where they could move around, such as in front-line Sales ).

The theory of multiple intelligences gives adults a whole new way to look at their lives, examining potentials that they left behind in their childhood (such as a love for art or drama) but now have the opportunity to develop through courses, hobbies, or other programs of self-development.

This is another way of chasing away the boredom with the routine or the mundane work one becomes habituated to accept and live with, lowering the levels of enthusiasm, responsiveness and creativity – some of the essential ingredients for success in these competitive times.

What we must recognize is that these multiple intelligences offer choices to
a) Trainers / Teachers / Learning & Development facilitators – to use varied methods and practices of transferring and processing learning deliverables and
b) Participants – to acquire and learn varied methods of addressing work itself , using creative methods to address work issues through the favoured and more developed intelligences

Let’s look at the Eight Intelligences and how Training or Learning Methods can be matched against them.

Intelligence Type and possible Learning Methods

Linguistic intelligence ("word smart"):
Reference reading material, reference books, well scripted program handbook

Logical-mathematical intelligence ("number/reasoning smart")
Case Studies, Problem Solving Models & Techniques, Inventory / Questionnaire / Response Form / Instrument Evaluation & Analysis

Spatial intelligence ("picture smart")
Use of Graphs, Charts, Pictures and Diagrams

Bodily-Kinesthetic intelligence ("body smart")
Role Plays, Projects, Structured Training Games/Activities

Musical intelligence ("music smart")
Music with learning deliverable lyrics- participants create musical learning summaries using popular tunes / leveraging Nursery Rhymes to Advanced Learning Songs & Anthems

Interpersonal intelligence ("people smart")
Team Exercises, that need the identification and use of the varied resources of team members

Intrapersonal intelligence ("self smart")
Presentations by participants on processed learning, role-reversals : participants study and deliver ( teach ) selected modules in the program itself, participants are asked to create learning models / modules

Naturalist intelligence ("nature smart")
Learning from Real World Experiences, interpretations and guiding principles that emerge from such experiences.

Dr. Howard Gardner says that other than areas of developed expertise, most of us react or process and infer learning outcomes in all other areas in the manner we used to do as 5 year old kids – the earliest levels of cognitive intelligence.

Implications of this are as follows for Trainers/Facilitators/Teachers and our corporate participants.

As Trainers / Teachers / Facilitators we need to be experts at what we teach else we are simply transferring our own 5 year old childish reasoning and logic to the participants, who receive it believing it is the word of the expert. The snowballing consequences are nightmarish !

To be experts, demands more than average attention and learning in the area of study.

Extensive reading (to replace extensive research and study) is the minimal effort one has to undertake to raise the levels of personal awareness, knowledge/content and competence/understanding.

Participants are unlikely to react in the “expected” manner in either receiving, processing or understanding the learning deliverables, as they are most likely to be at a level of “non-expert” in these areas and therefore would have learning conclusions matching their own 5 year old level of logic and belief.

Concluding Remarks

This exercise leads us to some interesting conclusions in the training-learning process
Content transference is easily possible at an adult learning level. Summarising receipt of content at the end of the program is not an indication of learning or understanding as pointed out by. Dr. Gardner

Understanding can only be ascertained when participants apply the learning in simulated real world experiences that are necessarily different from the experience created when delivering the concept. For example, participants can offer each other their own past experiences and ask others how they would use the learning to have handled the situation, or offer their own new approaches to the old experience

Training Videos, Role Plays, Case Study Experiments, Training Exercises, need to be processed with “understanding” in mind – not a simple analysis of what happened in the experiment or video or exercise, which is what participants tend to explain, but how this learning can be applied at work / back in real life.

Similarly hoping that the video/exercise or experiment is “self-explanatory” is not constructive as the learning derived by participants is likely to be unprocessed content management and learning summaries are derived from the 5 year old child-like “theories of life” . The “expert” must anchor the learning rather than leave loose ends to be automatically tied.

Understanding can be investigated only by moving from “Foundational “ Questioning / Basic Questions = What, Why, How to the more advance “Aesthetic” Level Questioning Skills / Questions that ask participants to offer personally processed input that has direct bearing on their work practices or behaviour

Program Design and Delivery Process

Program designs which are packed almost like a school-time table leave very little processing and understanding time. The program flow is often “impaired” by handling lack of understanding or processing by participants and therefore participants learn to respond by cleverly managing the showcasing of content to represent learning and understanding, in order to release the program flow and time which tends to be the casualty, in a concept-crowded program.

Dealing with Learning Hurdles

The Facilitator has to be equipped to deal with the following learning hurdles which participants will unconsciously throw up.
i. Misconceptions : based on their past experiences, pet theories and assumptions
ii. Rigid Algorithms / Formulas : formed from their earlier explanations of how the world works ; input to output formulas that worked or seemed to work ; expert opinions of others they consider experts, information in magazines / MIS data ( tabulated and charted data tends to overwhelm the thinking and understanding process )
iii. Stereotyping and World Views held by participants to diagnose and judge the rest of the world , in order to make decisions, are usually based on earlier formed assumptions and perceptions which without confrontation or validity checks, often script the guide book of their current life